Mellow gold

Beth Orton's Central Reservation

by Stephanie Zacharek

There's so much to like about Beth Orton -- and about her second LP, Central Reservation (Deconstruction/Arista) -- that it only seems fair to air major misgivings right at the start. Her lyrics are nowhere. Her melodies too often melt into one another -- there isn't much that distinguishes one from another. She doesn't offer much in the way of stimulation or challenge: her songs settle into a major groove and stay there, which makes her CDs (this one and her 1997 debut Trailer Park) somewhat static. Her songs never hit the gas; they never quite surprise you.

Yet there's something to be said for background music that's not just wallpaper. On Central Reservation, Orton hits a mood and sustains it. The disc has a silvery, sheer quality -- like moonlight glowing through summer curtains. It's relaxing music that, lyrics aside, isn't slack or dopy, partly because Orton isn't just another Ivory-soap folkie. Her voice does have a dove-white purity, but there's just enough feathering around the edges -- just enough edge, period -- to keep it from fading into obscure pleasantness. She knows the difference between delicacy and preciousness.

There's nothing on Central Reservation that's as likely to grab you as "She Cries Your Name," from Trailer Park -- its melodies aren't particularly inventive. This is the sort of album you might put on while you're doing a bit of dusting or making dinner for a friend. It doesn't demand all of your attention; there doesn't seem to be quite enough to dig into. But the arrangements are so varied, and so often inventive, that you might now and then find yourself stopping dead in your tracks to listen carefully. Orton's songs are like yard-sale tables of oddball bits and pieces cleverly combined: the coffeehouse percussion and scratchy-LP crackle of "Couldn't Cause Me Harm"; the lanky piano lines and plummy plucked cello strings on "Sweetest Decline"; the rippling vibraphone and chocolaty bent bass notes that lend shape to the easy cowboy-campfire groove of "Pass in Time."

Orton can be so imaginative musically that it brings you up short when she goes wrong with the lyrics ("Watch your fear just turn into relief/See your doubt become your own belief"). And the piano on "So Much More" is far too Windham Hill, overly tasteful and bland and organic, a safe choice that's actually jarring. But maybe it particularly jumps out because Orton, who's done several guest vocals for the Chemical Brothers, is so unafraid of technology: she balances and layers electronic textures with as much ease and grace as she does acoustic instruments. That's why she stands out in sharp relief against the prissiness of so much contemporary folk music. Although most people -- in the music business and elsewhere -- will readily acknowledge the advantages of technology, there are still a surprising number who don't want to be caught embracing it too closely. Dulcimers are all well and good -- but do they really give most of us as much pleasure as e-mail?

Orton, on the other hand, plugs in without giving it a second thought, and you can hear how it sets her free. Ordinarily I'd see it as pretension of the highest order for a singer to include two versions of the same song on the same LP, as she does here with the title track. But the different readings balance each other well. In the first, her firefly-bright vocals stand out against an ash-blond acoustic guitar sound and a plush pillow of strings; Mark Stent puts a nice technoglow polish on the production. On the second, overtly techno version (produced by Ben Watt of Everything But the Girl), Orton sounds even more energized, skimming over the track's skittery drum-machine rhythms and echoey sci-fi effects like a dragonfly over water. The harpsichord-like keyboards and buttery wash of strings in the background provide enough of a connection to the past. Otherwise, Orton is ready to move forward, mouse and modem in hand. Dulcimers be damned.